DEFORESTATION AROUND THE WORLD - India Environment Portal

Bunjil Forest Watch a Community-Based Forest Monitoring Service
through the implementation of policies such as strengthened law enforcement, fire
management or sustainable forest management. The framework requires measuring the
existing carbon stored in the forest and estimating what would be emitted under a business
as usual scenario. A project to avoid those emissions is proposed and at the end of a set time
period, the actual emissions are measured and compared to what would have happened.
The reduced emissions have a financial value that can be traded in carbon markets. Some of
the value is hopefully transferred to the locals as income for preserving the forest. Redd-
Monitor.org has a good introduction to REDD and its many controversies. REDD is
important but not essential to this service.
Just as REDD threatens to recentralise forest governance (Phelps et al., 2010), this service
may help democratise forest monitoring away from national forest departments where the
capability and governance is not yet in place, and towards grass-roots organisations.
There are several challenges to achieve this. One critical ingredient is regular, low-cost
access to recent satellite images - and automated processing of those images into a format
volunteers could reliably decode.
To eliminate costs to end users, the system should be based on open-source software, cloudhosted,
and have free regular access to timely satellite data. The solution needs to focus on
simplicity of use and hide as much complexity as possible behind a well-designed webapplication.
2. Purpose
"Never depend upon institutions of government to solve any problem. All social movements are
founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals."
Margaret Mead
This tool could provide a complementary self-selecting targeted approach to monitoring
areas of high conservation value wherever a local group wishes to protect their forests from
external threats.
The main purpose of the service is to provide local conservation groups with timely
information about forest disturbances in their area and to provide them with increased
opportunities to respond quickly to recent deforestation, particularly illegal logging and
land clearing. A recent study of Sumatra and Kalimantan found that at least 6.5% of all
forest cover loss had occurred in land where clearing was banned, and a further 13.6 %
where it was legally restricted (Broich et al., 2011).
A secondary purpose is to develop networks between people working to conserve remote
areas and ‘environmentalists’ in populated, digitally-connected areas.
3. Who are the users?
“Enforcement against illegal deforestation is clearly a state function, but civil society can
provide a formidable assist with timely, high-quality, user-friendly information.”
Three Essential Strategies for Reducing Deforestation
(Aliança da Terra et al., 2007)
This proposal separates forest monitoring into two main roles, the volunteer observers, who
regularly review the latest satellite images and the local groups, who rely on alerts when
disturbances are detected. Other roles include the sponsors & NGOs, satellite data
providers, and developers.
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